In Angela’s spiritual itinerary the passage from conversion
to mystical experience, from what can be expressed to the inexpressible,
happens through the crucifix.
And the “suffering God-man,” who becomes her “teacher of
perfection.”
Hence, all her mystical experience tends to a perfect
“likeness” with him, through ever more profound and radical purifications and
transformations.
In such a stupendous enterprise Angela puts her whole self,
soul and body, without sparing herself penances and tribulations from the
beginning to the end, desiring to die with all the pains suffered by the
God-man crucified to be transformed totally in him.
“O children of God,” she recommended, “transform yourselves
totally in the suffering God-man, who so loves you that he deigned to die for
you the most ignominious and all together ineffably painful death and in the
most painful and bitter way. This only for love of you, O man!”.
This identification also means to live what Jesus lived:
poverty, contempt, sorrow because, as she affirmed:
“Through temporal poverty the soul will find eternal riches;
through contempt and shame it will obtain supreme honor and very great glory;
through a little penance, made with pain and sorrow, it will possess with
infinite sweetness and consolation of the Supreme God, God eternal”.
From conversion to mystical union with Christ crucified, to the inexpressible. A very lofty way, whose secret is constant prayer:
“The more you pray,” she affirms, “the more you will be
illumined; the more you are illumined, the more profoundly and intensely you
will see the Supreme Good, the supremely good Being.
“The more profoundly and intensely you see him, the more you
will love him; the more you love him, the more he will delight you.
“And the more he delights you, the more you will understand
him and become capable of understanding him.
“You will arrive successively to the fullness of light,
because you will understand that you cannot understand”.
Benedict XVI (b. 1927): On Medieval Mystic Blessed
Angela of Foligno (translation
byZenit).
Above from blog: Enlarging the Heart blog
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